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“No.”

“I went in there with you,” she was shouting at him. “Youtookme in there, you brooding eejit. I should be there to look into the findings with you!”

Fucking hell she was beautiful when she was angry. But not as beautiful as when she laughed.

Sonder shook his thoughts loose. She might not be his student, but she was stillastudent and he was a professor. And she’d already almost passed out on him twice. He shouldn't have involved her as much as he had. He’d wait for the paper she said she was working on. Her research. Then cut this off, whateverthiswas. It would have to be enough.

“No,” he said again with more conviction than he felt.

“But—” She was standing in the petrol car park, her indignant face lit by the overhead car light as she tried again to convince him to let her come to Achilles House with him.

“Goodnight, Atta.” He reached across the car. “Pleasant dreams.” And closed the door in her face.

She shouted several unseemly things at him through the window before finally retreating to her car.

He didn’t drive away until she got in and drove off in the direction of Trinity.

It wasn’t until he pulled up the long cobbled drive of his estate and checked his pockets that he realised she’d stolen one of his samples.

Atta

“Bloody bastard.”

It had been her mantra for the last three days. She’d hardly slept, hardly eaten, and even bit off Emmy’s head when she tried to make her leave her room to go to Mulligan’s with her and the lads. She’d spent every free second she wasn’t in class or at work studying the mushroom and mycelium sample she’d stolen off Gold Stitch and compiling all of her research over the last six years into something resembling a proper scientific journal.

It had begun as a compilation for Sonder—what he’d asked her to do that day in the library—but it had quickly become an obsession. An obsession not only to understand the Plague but to make sense of what was happening to her. Why she was seeing visions and hallucinations. Why she had seen something that truly happened after the fact.

Despite having asked for the report, Sonder hadn’t mentioned it again and had been oddly formal and distant since she’d last seen him. In fact, she was adding him to the Bloody Bastard column too, because he’d sent her to fetch coffee. Something he hadn’t done since the day they bonded—or so she thought—over the autopsy of the murdered woman. When she’d proven she was no man’s vapid waitstaff.

Just for being a fuckerthese last few days, she was going to get him a paper cup. Hehatedtakeaway cups—said they turned too flimsy andhad no class about them.

She stomped the rest of the way to the teachers’ room, surprised to see Emmy and Marguerite Vasilios there.

“Atta!” Emmy said cheerily. “She lives! Frankenstein’s monster lives!”

Professor Vasilios laughed without looking up from her newspaper and Atta cracked a tight smile. “Clever,” the professor murmured, looking as flawless and exotic as ever.

“What are you two doing way over here in this building?” Atta asked, ignoring the jab.

Emmy tapped a pen to a pad of paper in front of her. “Marguerite has been invited to try out her group therapy on Dr Frankenstein’s students like we talked about.”

Atta ground her teeth together. Sonder had failed to mention that to her.

“Emmaline,” Vasilios censured lightly, looking at them over her open newspaper for the first time, “you really must stop calling Professor Murdoch that.”

Atta found the oldest paper cup of the bunch, the one already wonky at the lip, that had been touched by who knew how many hands, and filled it with the stalest, sludgiest coffee. “Well, I’ll be seeing you,” she said snippily and left the lounge, Emmy looking at her like she’d lost her mind.

Sonder was highlighting a passage in a book when she stormed in, and she noted that he covered the pages with a file folder when he saw her.

“Ah, coffee.”

She slammed the cup down, some of the hot liquid sloshing out of the lid’s spout. “Here.”

She turned to leave, but he was around the desk in a flash. “Atta, wait.”

Crossing her arms, she stared up at him. “What?”

“You seem perturbed with me.”